Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult founded by Shoko Asahara, evolved from a spiritual movement into a dangerous terrorist organization, exploiting societal anxieties and utilizing advanced chemical warfare capabilities to inflict mass casualties and sow terror.
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Obsessive dedication and religious fanaticism is not an idea exclusive to the west,
as cults have a history of emerging from even the most unexpected of places.
This is exactly what occurred in the case of the Aum Shinrikyo cult during the late
1980’s in Japan. After the second World War, Japan’s society began developing rapidly,
and those who could not keep up, were left behind. As cities, technology,
and the government faced rapid changes, many grew critical of the new world they were faced with,
and this mix of exclusion and mistrust paired with the progression and accessibility of
chemical warfare was the perfect breeding ground to create the deadliest cult Japan had ever seen.
Shoko Asahara was born on March 2nd, 1955, he was one of nine children in an impoverished family
living in the Kumamoto Prefecture. His birth name was Chizuo Matsumoto, which he later changed,
but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll be referring to him as Shoko Asahara from now on.
From birth, Ashara developed infantile glaucoma, visually impairing him, a condition that would
leave him almost fully blind and, in his later years, force Asahara to attend a boarding school
for blind children. Although, even from a young age, Asahara seemed to like the idea of power,
he was known to be a bully at his boarding school, physically injuring his classmates or taking their
money. But as Asahara grew older, he leaned towards a more mental and spiritual lifestyle.
He had graduated from junior college in 1975 and turned towards the study of acupuncture, before
ultimately devoting his time to studying religion in the early 1980s. But ironically, as Asahara
became more religious, his hate towards Japan and the Japanese government grew. He grew dissatisfied
with traditional Japanese Buddhism and leaned more towards a mix of Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity
and his own prophecies instead, preferring a form of religion without Japanese influence.
He meshed this new branch of theology with his own knowledge of meditation and yoga, and would soon
go on to create his own religious organization. But for the meantime, Asahara had to start small.
In 1984, Asahara, now a guru, had created a one-room yoga and meditation class, a platform he
would use to introduce his own religious ideals to his students. The steadily growing class was based
in Shibuya City, a special ward in Tokyo known to house two of the busiest railway stations in the
world, a detail that Aum Shinrikyo would soon take into account. Nevertheless, Asahara had
initially named the class “Aum Shinsen-no Kai” before later changing it to “Aum Shinrikyo” or
“Supreme Truth” in English. In 1989, and after constant pressure by members of Aum Shinrikyo,
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government finally recognized the group as a religious corporation,
a title that would grant the cult immunity against investigations into its activities. This was a
major turning point for the cult, recognition as a legitimate organization meant that Aum could
increase its reach and devious practices without being investigated. This formality would later
prove to be a severe lapse in judgment on the part of the Tokyo metropolitan police. But for the
meantime, Aum Shinrikyo, now more of a cult than a class, was growing rapidly, as was modern Japanese
culture. With the increasing popularity of anime and pop-culture magazines, Asahara saw the perfect
opportunity to reach Japan’s youngest and most impressionable demographic. After being recognized
as a legitimate corporation, Aum’s membership grew exponentially, as did their net worth,
most members of the cult were young adults who had seen the group in magazines or flyers. One
of Asahara’s most popular selling points was his apparent ability to levitate for hours at a time.
He also claimed to be able to cleanse the sins of members, and often prophesied of
a Third World War or a Nuclear Apocalypse in which only members of Aum would survive.
This, along with its recognition as a legitimate corporation, accelerated Aum’s growth rapidly;
and by the early 1990s, Aum had amassed around 10,000 members, and their net worth had reached
over 500 million yen. But as Aum grew in net worth and members, so did their opposition.
Over the years, former cult members had begun to speak out against Aum Shinrikyo’s
zero-tolerance policy, and its torture of members who tried to leave the cult without permission.
There had been rumors spreading around the general public that members of Aum had been subjected to
inhumane conditions, and been experimented on. Ofcourse, these rumors were all true,
but because of the aforementioned title as a religious corporation, no major investigations had
been launched. With no action from the government against Aum, more and more anti-Aum groups started
forming. Those who had relatives or family members in the cult were becoming increasingly
anxious about their safety. Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a prominent lawyer of multiple anti-Aum groups,
had publicly denounced the cult and claimed that its members were being held against their will.But
as Sakamoto began working on a class action lawsuit against the cult, he and his whole family
seemingly disappeared from their apartment in Yokohama, the second most populated city in Japan.
At the time, no-one had connected Sakamoto’s disappearance to the Aum Shinrikyo cult,
however in the later years, police would soon discover that, on November 3,
1989, only a few months after being declared a religious corporation, multiple senior members
of the Aum Shinrikyo cult drove to Sakamoto’s home and injected him, his wife, and his 14 month old
baby with potassium chloride, a lethal injection that would force the body into cardiac arrest,
killing all three of them. They then dumped the bodies in three different Prefectures
across Japan, so that in case the bodies were found by police, they wouldn’t link the
murders. By the early to mid 1990s, Aum had grown to more than 20,000 members. They’d opened a new
headquarters building in Kamikuishiki, on the base of Mount Fuji. The cults recruitment system had
proved successful as Aum was growing larger and larger everyday. With more and more people joining
the cult, and with more influence than ever before, Asahara decided to run for parliament.
In 1990, Asahara and 24 other members of his inner circle announced that they would be
candidates in that year’s Japanese Diet Election under their own party, the Shinrito, in English,
the “Truth Party”. Although Asahara's cult had been growing faster than ever before,
his campaign of singing and dancing in downtown Tokyo wasn’t attracting enough attention.
Ultimately, Asahara only received around 1,700 votes out of 500,000 votes cast.
To add to the humiliation, some members of his cult hadn’t even voted for his party,
it's speculated that Aum’s radical prophecies of apocalypses had hindered their ability to
gain votes from the general public. Nevertheless, after the cult’s humiliating loss in the election,
Shoko Asahara started to become more violent, and as time went on, the cult's dangerous
activities took a drastic turn for the worse. But before we get into the cults' later attacks
on the Japanese public, we need to establish what the cults' beliefs were. Essentially,
Shoko Asahara preached that there were multiple levels of consciousness that a person could reach.
Asahara, ofcourse, claimed that he had the highest level of consciousness and that other people could
raise their consciousness as well if they joined the cult and followed the divine teachings of
their Supreme Master Shoko Asahara.Members in the cult had to hand over almost all
their worldly possessions to Asahara and were subjected to, what the cult called, “Survival
Training”, in which members would be subjected to prolonged submersion underwater, drug abuse,
and mental trauma. Asahara believed that a major war would break out between Japan and the United
States in the following years involving weapons of mass destruction. This war, he believed,
would mark the start of the Armageddon, and the end of humanity. Members who tried to leave the
cult were brutalized, and in most cases, murdered. Outsiders who publicly spoke out against the cult,
as we previously mentioned, were usually assassinated by senior members of Aum. Asahara
motivated his members by telling them stories of his own clairvoyant-like experiences. He claimed
that he was able to levitate and fly around rooms on command, however in all the pictures provided,
it’s clear that he’s either jumping off the floor, or the picture has been manipulated in some way.
To recruit more young members into the cult, they had created their own animation studio
to make a 10-episode anime named Chouetsu Sekai. It consisted mostly of propaganda
and stories about Shoko Asahara and his quest for the “Supreme Truth”.
This, along with multiple TV appearances is what made Aum’s recruitment campaign so successful.
By the early 1990s, Aum had not only recruited members of the youth,
but accomplished professionals as well,
chemists, scientists, biologists, and even officers from the Japanese Self Defense Force
had joined the Aum Shinrikyo cult because of its increasingly successful propaganda campaign.
In 1992, looking to recruit even more people to Aum, Asahara and several cult members went
to Moscow, Russia to open a branch of the cult, a move that would cause a spike in members for Aum,
adding more than 20,000 members to the cult. They’d also forged connections with several
Russian government officials like the then Vice President of Russia, Alexander Rutskoy,
and Chairman Khasbulatov. As Aum became more and more powerful in Japan and Russia,
Asahara decided to expand the cult in new ways. After making connections with officials
in Russia, Asahara gained access to various military weapons, personnel, and training,
and because Aum still believed that a Third World War was imminent, the group began militarizing
rapidly. In the early 1990s, Aum had apparently been planning to manufacture as many as 1,000
AK-74’s and cartridges and had given around 200 of its members military training.
The Aum Shinrikyo cult seemed like it was preparing for war. Although almost all efforts to
mass produce firearms ultimately failed, Aum was much more successful with another type of weapon.
In the Spring of 1993, Aum had started acquiring resources to mass produce Sarin, a colourless,
odourless nerve agent that can lead to vomiting, loss of consciousness, convulsions, paralysis, and
asphyxiation when in contact with skin. Suffice to say, Sarin is a very dangerous chemical weapon.
Aum had also considered researching other chemicals like VX, Tabun, and Soman,
all very toxic chemical substances. Nevertheless, Aum had begun researching and producing these
chemical agents under the supervision of various chemists who had previously joined the cult,
like Masami Tsuchiya, a member who’d gotten his Master’s degree in Chemistry a few years prior.
This, along with the cult’s development of biological weapons like Botulism Toxins and
Anthrax, meant that they were ready to launch their first major chemical attack in Tokyo.
On June 29, 1993, five residents living in Kameido, Tokyo reported a foul odour to the
local health authorities. Upon investigation, officers found that the smell was coming from
an eight story building in the area, known to be Aum Shinrikyo’s headquarters. The smell persisted
through the next day, and the residents, now fed up with Aum’s practices, registered 41
complaints to local health authorities to investigate the origin of the smell.
But when authorities asked for permission to enter the cult’s headquarters and investigate the smell,
they were denied entry. After one more day of the foul odour and 118 more complaints
filed by residents, Shoko Asahara and his cult were forced out of the area.
But more than two weeks would go by until city inspectors investigated the cult’s headquarters,
and by that time, the members and the equipment had been long gone.
Since no one had been injured or died from the foul odour, this incident was largely forgotten
until, in the following years, several former Aum cult members revealed that a gas they’d
been testing, Anthrax, had been emanating on the roof of the building they were occupying with the
intention to cause a inhalational Anthrax epidemic among the residents living in the area.
Although their plan had turned into a complete disaster,
the Aum Shinrikyo cult realized that testing their chemical weapons in Japan was too risky
so, as a way to cover up their research, they bought a remote sheep station in Western Australia
where they’d test their chemicals on cattle, ultimately killing 29 sheep in their experiments.
Now, with a new way to test their chemical weapons away from the scrutiny of the Japanese government,
Asahara and his cult were now more experienced, and ready to test their chemical weapons again.
this time in a quiet neighbourhood in the city of Matsumoto.
Matsumoto housed three judges who were expected to rule against the cult in a land dispute,
which made them prime targets for Aum, whose plan was to release Sarin gas into the courthouse.
However a last minute change in plans led the cult to target the judges’ three story apartment
building, where they lived. So, on June 27, 1994, members of Aum drove down a small neighbourhood
road in Matsumoto. They used a refrigerated truck to release a cloud of Sarin, which would turn into
an aerosol and float to the homes of the judges. However, in the process of this targeted attack,
everyone in the neighbourhood who came in contact with the free floating aerosol was affected.
Five people were found dead in their homes, two people had died right after hospital admission,
and another had slipped into a coma for fourteen years, passing away in 2008. A total of 274
people were treated in hospital following the attack, one of the largest attacks that Aum
had conducted at the time. The following police investigation turned up little to no information.
In fact, police had accused a 44 year-old man named Yoshiyuki Kōno of setting up the attack
on the neighbourhood, it was found that he had several chemicals in his possession and, despite
not having the technical know-how to commit such a large scale attack, he was named as the sole
perpetrator. Kōno had received death threats and hate mail but, in the following year,
after discovering that Aum had carried out the attack, Kōno received public apologies from all
news agencies that had accused him, but did not get an apology from the Nagano Police Force until
2002. It would take around a year for the Aum Shinrikyo cult to be implicated in this incident,
so, at the time, Aum considered this a victory. They’d successfully injured hundreds of residents
and killed at least seven while, at the same time, testing out their Sarin for the first time.
This, to them, proved that they were ready for bigger and better targets.
Aum was nearing the peak of their power with the successful manufacturing of biological and
chemical weapons, the semi-successful production of illegal drugs like LSD,
and their distribution of these drugs to the Yakuza, Japanese organized crime.
But, in a series of bad decisions, the empire that was once Aum, would come crumbling down.
In early 1995, a wealthy cult member had escaped from Aum’s
headquarters in Kamikuishiki with the help of her brother, 69 year-old Kiyoshi Kariya. As a result,
Aum members kidnapped Kariya off a Tokyo street and brought him to their headquarters where they
drugged and interrogated him for information about his sister, the escapee. However, in the process
of the interrogation, Kariya had overdosed, and his body was then burned in an incinerator.
Among other factors, Kariya’s disappearance had sparked a major police investigation into the Aum
Shinrikyo cult, with plans to simultaneously raid all of Aum’s facilities in March 1995. But three
days before the raid, Asahara was tipped off by cult members in the Japanese Self Defense Force.
So, a preemptive strike was planned to be carried out in the Tokyo subway during its rush hours.
Aum immediately started producing large quantities of liquid Sarin, as well as planning their attack.
On the morning of March 20, 1995, five Aum Shinrikyo members carrying packets of liquid
sarin wrapped in newspaper boarded three different lines in the Tokyo Subway, the Hibiya, Chiyoda,
and Marunouchi line. The three lines were expected to converge at the central Kasumigaseki station,
where hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens passed by everyday. The station
was also walking distance from Tokyo’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finance, Labor, and Health
as well as both the Tokyo Police and the National Police Agency, hinting at Aum’s hatred towards the
Japanese government. So, during the morning rush hour in Tokyo, their plan was set into action.
Fourty-eight year-old Ikuo Hayashi boarded the south-bound train on the Chiyoda Line,
and after riding the train for three stops, he punctured one of two liquid Sarin packages
with the sharpened tip of an umbrella before disembarking a short while later. This allowed
the sarin gas to leak into the air in the subway train, forcing all the passengers in the compact
and poorly ventilated area to begin inhaling the poisonous gas. For the next few minutes,
the train continued on its scheduled path, but after multiple complaints from passengers of
foul smells and liquid Sarin spilling onto the floor, it was taken out of service. The effects
of sarin gas on the body can range from mild to severe, but the sheer concentration of sarin gas
as well as the compact area of distribution causes a gradual buildup of symptoms in the body,
starting from discomfort about the smell to fits of uncontrollable coughing,
choking, and eventually vomiting. At around the same time, 31 year-old Ken'ichi Hirose boarded the
west-bound train on the Marunouchi line before puncturing his Sarin package after four stops.
The train unknowingly continued on its scheduled path before two severely injured passengers
had to be removed. Despite this, the train continued until it reached its destination,
then departed again in the opposite direction, before finally being taken out of service.
This specific attack left one passenger dead and around 350 more injured. On the same subway line,
and at around the same time, 32 year-old Masato Yokoyama boarded the fifth car headed eastbound,
before slightly poking a hole in one of two Sarin packages, disembarking one stop later. But because
Yokoyama hadn’t majorly punctured either of his Sarin packages, passengers as well as staff hadn’t
realized what had happened, so the train had continued until the end of its line where it was
eventually evacuated and searched. But searchers hadn’t found either of the Sarin packages,
so the train departed in the opposite direction at 8:32 am. But after passengers started falling ill,
station attendants finally found the liquid Sarin, before promptly mopping the floor and continuing
on the scheduled route for another hour. The train was finally taken out of service at 9:27 am,
leaving no casualties but 200 people in serious condition. On the final, Hibiya subway line,
university graduate Toru Toyoda boarded the northeast-bound train at around 8 am
before puncturing both of his Sarin packages and promptly leaving at the next station.
He was on the train for a total of two minutes, but, in this fatal attack he left one passenger
dead and 532 others injured as the train continued on its route for three more stops, even then, only
the front car was evacuated. The train continued until the next stop, where it was eventually taken
out of service. And one of the last and deadliest attacks took place on the opposite end of the
Hibiya subway line. Senior university graduate Yasuo Hayashi boarded the south-bound train,
but unlike the other attackers, Hayashi carried three Sarin packages instead of two.
According to various sources, he had volunteered to use a third, flawed Sarin package to show his
loyalty to the group. Nevertheless, having boarded the train, Hayashi repeatedly punctured two of his
three packages, before promptly disembarking. By the time the train had reached the next stop,
passengers had noticed the Sarin packages leaking fluid onto the floor, prompting one passenger to
kick it out onto the subway platform. This seemingly harmless action allowed for the
sarin gas to infiltrate the air in the subway platform, where dozens of other citizens stood
waiting for the train, effectively forcing even more Tokyo residents to be exposed to the gas.
This simple action increased the death toll by taking four more lives, but not before the people
in the train began starting to feel the effects of the Sarin. At 8:10 am, one passenger began feeling
overwhelmed by the effects of the sarin, and pressed the emergency stop button on the train,
but because the train was travelling in a tunnel at the time, they had no choice but to continue
until they’d reached the next station, and by that time, multiple passengers had succumbed to
the exposure of the Sarin. In total, fourteen people died in the attack, twelve of them had
died on the day of the attack, one had died the following day, and another had died in 2020,
after the exposure to sarin left them bedridden for 25 years. With around 6,500 people injured,
this attack was one of the worst cases of domestic terrorism in Japanese history.
After the attack, a media frenzy swiftly ensued as the cult entered the public eye. Due to this
and a number of other factors, in the following years, the Aum Shinrikyo cult would completely
fall apart, multiple full scale raids were carried out at Aum headquarters in Tokyo, Kamikuishiki,
and Russia. During these raids, police found and seized various explosives, chemical weapons,
illegal drugs, and even prisoners who were found in cells in various buildings,
most of whom had been part of anti-Aum groups or been connected to an escaped member.
But this didn’t stop Aum from trying to carry out even more attacks in a desperate
attempt to try and distract police. On May 5, 1995, a few months after the subway attack,
sodium cyanide was found in a public restroom at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, but the device,
made of two plastic bags containing different chemicals, was quickly found and seized by police.
On May 16, a letter bomb was mailed to the Governor of Metropolitan Tokyo, and upon opening,
the letter exploded, blowing the fingers off of the Governor's left hand. Five Aum members were
swiftly arrested and charged for the attack. Aum had attempted to commit more terrorist attacks,
but most were unsuccessful. The empire that was once a religious corporation worth multi-million
yen was now deemed a terrorist group in Russia, Canada, the US, and many more. On May 16th,
after evading police for around two months, Shoko Asahara was finally arrested after he was found
at one of Aum’s headquarters, beginning the quote “trial of the century” as dubbed by the Japanese
media. Asahara was found guilty on 13 of his 17 charges, as police were just now uncovering
his earlier attacks such as the Sakomoto Family Murder and the Matsumoto sarin Attack.
Ultimately, Asahara was sentenced to death by hanging in 2004. And in 2018, he was executed
along with many other senior members of Aum. Since then, the Aum Shinrikyo cult has been depicted
in video games like “The Story of Kamikuishiki Village”, a Japanese doujin game that recently
rose in popularity because of speculation that it was made as a recruitment strategy for the cult.
However, it was later revealed that the single-player game was satirical, aimed
at making fun of the cult by using real footage from the attack to dramatize their great failure.
The Aum Shinrikyo cult terrorized the Japanese population for years, committing assassinations,
feeding corruption, and unleashing indiscriminate terror attacks on the people of Tokyo. Even now,
Aum Shinrikyo hasn’t been fully banned in Japan. A few years after the subway attack in 1995,
the cult changed its name to ‘Aleph’ and is now more private than ever before, although it’s now
under intense supervision by the Japanese police. After a unleashing a fatal attack on the public,
Japan’s most dangerous cult was finally brought down, and although the threat was trivialized in
later years, the dangers that this group posed to the Japanese public cannot be forgotten.
